How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don’t want to die!
ATTRIBUTION:
Denis Diderot (1713–1784), French philosopher, encyclopedist, dramatist, novelist, art critic. Salon of 1767 (1798), Oeuvres esthétiques, p. 644, Paris, Garnier Flammarion (1988).
Meditation by Diderot upon viewing the landscapes depicting ruins by the French contemporary painter Hubert Robert.
